I've been frustrated that Maïmouna Doucouré does... a not-very-good job actively defending her choices verbally in interviews since this shitstorm started I mean, filmmakers often say you become a filmmaker to communicate via movies, not via essays and interviews Even so
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Which, again, is fair, but as a result it's just an endless barrage of people asking "Why did you have to show the dancing for real" and her giving non-answers like "We had the parents on set, we had an on-set psychologist working with the kids, etc"
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And I kind of want to take a stab at talking about what she talked about in her earlier interviews - saying that the shocking preteen dance concert she saw that moved her to make this movie filled her with both disgust and "admiration" (a quote the haters jumped on)
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Or the stuff about her saying the movie was in conversation with the imaginary version of her mom in her head, like all her work is to some degree, that the mom in the movie says the things she wishes her mom would say in the ending
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Or the one quote where she said it was important to show the dancing because "This isn't an after school special, this is real" (another quote the haters have taken out of context)
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I think what she's getting at overall is that in her view for the movie to work the dancing has to be appealing The audience has to understand that the girls actually love being in the Cuties That for them it actually does feel amazing, powerful, exciting, free
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The whole thing is that all the girls' negative behaviors are very much self-driven There's no Svengali in this movie, there's no adult "bad guy" who directly exploits them or grooms them or teaches them anything The whole movie happens because of the absence of adults
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And that's a real poke in the eye for conservatives and the conservative worldview This movie isn't about parents' "failure to protect their kids", not in the sense they mean Quite the opposite, everything happens because Amy's mom protects her *too much*
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There's a lot of discourse about this movie where people go "She was trying to talk about the world kids live in right now" and the angry parent goes "Not MY kids! MY kids don't know about any of this filth! I don't even let them have a phone or go online!"
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Well... Neither did Amy's mom! Amy doesn't have a phone either, the one she uses is stolen She's never been allowed online, her mom refuses to talk to her about sex other than to tell her bad girls are headed for a bad ending in life, she's totally ignorant and "innocent"
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And that's why the movie happens Because she has no positive relationship with any adults in her life, everything about her life is a cage of lies and gaslighting and denial (the scene with her mom sobbing desperately over her dad's infidelity then pretending it never happened)
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There's a lot of reviewers complaining the extent of Amy's shenanigans is exaggerated and unrealistic -- getting away with stealing a phone that long, enrolling in a whole-ass dance competition without her parents knowing -- but again it's a satire
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Your kid probably won't be able to get away with a much as Amy does in the movie but you're a fucking goddamn fool if you don't think they're getting away with SOMETHING No parent can actually keep their kid in a panopticon, especially if both parents have to work
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(This rings extremely true to me, having had very religious, conservative parents who were also absolutely not as fucking smart as they thought they were Like *they actually succeeded* in keeping me way more sheltered than my peers but they were still totally fucking naive)
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(Fucking getting The Talk when I was in fucking *high school* asking me if I knew what sex was and if I'd ever seen porn, for Christ's sake)
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But anyway The whole thing that comes up when you look at discussions of inappropriate sexualization is that *the kids are the ones fighting the parents* We all know that but people are often naive about it Amy does all this acting out because *she wants to, it feels good*
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And she's been given zero context and zero ability to process that it feels good to get attention, it feels good to be desired, it feels good to feel like you're growing up and becoming an adult She's just told that girls who do that are "bad girls" and will be punished
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And the natural response to that is to go "Okay, well, I'll fucking be bad, and I dare you to punish me" Her mom being in huge denial about the fact that trying to set an example of what a future life as a dutiful "good girl" wife and mother looks like is an awful sales pitch
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@Nymphomachy brought up this movie in the context of the callouts of Shane Dawson, Onision, etc And without trying to defend or redeem those guys or act like they have no culpability, it's worth pointing out... They're not all that smart or talentedShow this thread -
The narrative here, the social problem that we are dealing with, is not the manipulative genius of Shane Dawson He didn't create some terrifyingly clever trap to plant the seeds of inappropriate behavior in young minds and twist them onto the path of perversion He was lucky
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He was an early adopter of YouTube at a time when YouTube had a lot of teenage girls who were really desperate and excited to find a cool older guy to hang out with who pissed off their parents Because that's what teen girls have always done
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Half his own jokes about this shit were about that The thing where he's all "jokingly" abusive to a random 13-year-old he finds on Omegle, "SHUT UP AND TWERK, BITCH" His self-deprecating jokes about how all his fans are idiots and he can get away with anything
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He grabbed something that people were eager to give away, that they almost pushed on him It's like David Bowie back in the 70s, where he defended himself re: the "baby groupie" culture of the time, plaintively arguing thousands of girls were throwing themselves at him
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Lori Mattix, the 15-year-old girl he slept with, continued to defend her "relationship" with Jimmy Page and David Bowie well into her 50s, and even lowkey kind of still does now After all, she says, she worked her fucking ass off to get in that situationhttps://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/mar/15/i-wouldnt-want-this-for-anybodys-daughter-will-metoo-kill-off-the-rocknroll-groupie …
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This is a dicey thing to talk about, because, again, no one is responsible for what an adult man does with an underage girl but the adult man But the whole reason it's such a prevalent problem is the adult men frequently don't have to work very hard for the opportunity
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The "bad guy" in Cuties isn't any one adult male creep It's "the patriarchy", but the patriarchy as expressed through a massively distributed system -- anonymous likes on the Internet, the faceless system of celebrity at work on TV and the radio
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The cruel joke of the movie is that the girls are following this system of incentives they don't understand to exploit *themselves* And are blissfully unaware that the actual adult men they meet view this with either disgust or laughing contempt
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It's not a movie about an actual guy manipulating and exploiting them because then it would be a different kind of movie It would be an "after-school special" where the solution to the problem is to just find guys like that and put them in jail
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Which is the worldview of a lot of the critics, and which is why they hyperfocus on the imaginary pedophile who may be watching the movie and talk like his reaction is the only important one ("If we just GOT RID of the pedophiles then there'd be no problem anymore!")
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Like, that's not what this movie is about Part of what it's about is that, yes, if the Cuties ever ran into someone who was intent on actually raping a child they'd be easy prey But that doesn't have to actually happen for it to fuck up their lives
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In their actual lives, the guys who think that inappropriate sexuality is viscerally disgusting are just as complicit as the creeps who quietly get off on it The scene with the two security guards that gets passed around as the "worst scene from Cuties" is about this fact
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